A bachelor's virtue depends upon his alertness; a married man's depends
upon his wife's.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't
know.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven
brag about it to persons who will never get there.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

A gentleman is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest
man a century.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after
that he begins to bunch them.

A man may be a fool and not know it- but not if he is married.

A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both
ears to the ground.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order
to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and
submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a
streetwalker.

A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still
young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes
and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.

A writer is always admired most, not by those who have read him, but by
those who have merely heard of him.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

After a revolution, of course, the successful revolutionists always try
to convince doubters that they have achieved great things, and usually
they hang any man who denies it.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit
it. I myself deny it.

An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor's
children devoured by wolves.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see
them misunderstood.

As an American, I naturally spend most of my time laughing.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and
more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious
day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last
and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it
remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries
and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a
woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man
will come out sadder and the woman wiser.

But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.

Certainly there is something radically wrong with a system which enables
a Henry Ford to posture magnificently as one who pays lavish wages, and
then, when the pinch comes, to lay of men by tens of thousands and throw
them on public charity.

Change is not progress.

Christendom is that part of the world where, if a man declare himself to
be a Christian, his hearers laugh at him.

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the
faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the
trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs,
and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to
humanity.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of
prophecies.

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.

Courtroom: A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be
equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car
salesman.

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he
knows to be idiots.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual
ignorance.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by
jackasses.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey
cage.

Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve
to get it good and hard.

Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.

During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York
upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of
Denmark for a year.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is
dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

Every man sees in his relatives a series of grotesque caricatures of
himself.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist
the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always
an easy solution to every human problem- neat, plausible, and wrong.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of
the improbable.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human
associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us
feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not
true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit
the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than
Christianity has made them good.

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the
miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of
superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above
their betters.

Government in America has taken on a vast mass of new duties and
responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to
every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around
its operations the high dignity and impeccability of religion; its
agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and
loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in
the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and
decent men. (1926)

Government, today, is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer
any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and
day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at
call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what
of it? The first one at least is disposed of.

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a
cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty
enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is
largely a waste of time.

I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that
outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any
honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the
majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.

I get little enjoyment out of women, more out of alcohol, most out of
ideas.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common
sense.

I'm against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would
promise them missionaries for dinner.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any
office of trust in the United States.

If I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God
in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to
please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely
girl.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes
explicable.

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

In a man's world... simian aptitudes are rated high, and so not too many
women get in. To succeed as a lawyer, for example, a woman would have to
throttle two of her chief attributes: her disdain for the petty
accumulations of useless knowledge, and her sharp feeling for the truth.
What men in their imbecility consistently mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering small and
trivial tricks.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a
favorite device of persons with something to sell.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful
for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended
from man.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that
you would lie if you were in his place.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards
or golf.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor
of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me
forever ineligible for public office.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a
resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to
physics or chemistry.

It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American
gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and
completely.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always
dull.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free
spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not
much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch
to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their
wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it
conquers them.

Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is
impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the
nose and another hanging on to his coattails.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so
long ago.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe,
but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry
later. For another thing, they die earlier.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an
appeal to the unintelligible.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more
uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is
right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been
the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men
who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized
man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.
His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Nature abhors a moron.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor- it will be extremely costly.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no
truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ
materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus
become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and
even more of national prejudice.

No man, examining his marriage intelligently, can fail to observe that
it is compounded, at least in part, of slavery, and that he is the slave.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to
discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average
woman of forty-eight.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow
to see him commit suicide for her.

No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the
secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is
always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.

No one in this world, as far as I know... has ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

One of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most
charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far
to seek. It is based on propositions that are palpably not true- and
what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more
fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true.

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy,
for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government
ever heard of on earth.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in
Italian.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well
anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back
to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left
to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to
let it alone.

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to
let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with
one who is.

Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

Temptation is a woman's weapon and a man's excuse.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement
that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous
and hence enormously fascinating.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most
timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose
steppers ever gathered under on flag in Christendom since the end of the
Middle Ages.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine,
for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to
war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few
butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

The average man never really thinks from beginning to end of his life.
The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What
they mistake for thought is simply repetition of what they have heard.
My guess is that well over 80% of the human race goes through life
without having a single original thought. Whenever a new one appears the
average man shows signs of dismay and resentment.

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the
intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the
fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a
high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines,
and the honor of a police-station lawyer.

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain
disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help
feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is
their father.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but
that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in
line.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate,
but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly
greater than that of any other animal.

The chief contribution of Presbyterianism to human thought is its
massive proof that God is a bore.

The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that
the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

The Creator is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter
regrets a discreditable act; even when it has worked and he has not been
caught.

The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy
is like saying the cure for crime is more crime.

The essence of a genuine professional man is that he cannot be bought.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given
idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its
truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always
yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller
in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes
preached in the thirteenth century.

The existence of most human beings is of absolutely no significance to
history or to human progress. They live and die as anonymously and as
nearly uselessly as so many bullfrogs or houseflies. They are, at best,
undifferentiated slaves upon an endless assembly line, and at worse they
are robots who leave their mark upon time only by occasionally falling
into the machinery...

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no
reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability
that yours is a fake.

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist “Jack”.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a
problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They
have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of
government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even
ordinarily respectable.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other
fellow married her.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is
obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is
almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man
with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely,
like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and
disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth
represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk
of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump
and a soul roasting in Hell.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most
daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell the truth.

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save
humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running
flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and
usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than
the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he
sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair.

The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just simple
competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear of the unknown,
the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is
safety.

The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any
force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in
time of peace.

The only really happy people are married women and single men.

The only way to success in American life lies in flattering and
kow-towing to the mob.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

The plain fact is that I am not a fair man and don't want to hear both
sides.

The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit
raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no
certainties.

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His
failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of
God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the
devil.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with
Christianity is the Christians.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of
one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that
oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the
beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard
and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the
urge to rule it.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is
identical with the discovery of truth- that the error and truth are
simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to,
when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and
maybe one worse than the first one.

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often
very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit
to oppression.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not
worth knowing.

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and
that is character.

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a
woman for a purely moral reason.

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got
as used to it.

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying
to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-and both commonly
succeed, and are right.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out
twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is
moonshine.

We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists, free
love and “art,” but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and every
one of them soon or late.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and
his children smart.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

When a man laughs at his misfortunes, he loses a great many friends.
They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that
an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have
two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.

When the water reaches the upper decks, follow the rats.

Whenever “A” attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon “B,” “A”
is most likely a scoundrel.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are
giving evidence at an inquest.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he
comes home an atheist.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sure
sign he expects to be paid for it.

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is
still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished
it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

Women don't like timid men. Cats do not like prudent mice.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile,
and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.